The late late show

2022 continues to show signs of a recovery for mass participation sport. Across all events, bookings on findarace.com are well up on this time in 2020, immediately before the first lockdown. But digging deeper into the numbers, we found a clear difference in booking patterns: entries for all types of events are coming in later.

To get a clearer picture of booking patterns, we compared current bookings with those from the same time of year pre-pandemic. Taking three points in the lead up to event day: 3 months out, 4 weeks out and 1 week out, there are a few clear trends.

3 months out:

The proportion of all bookings that are taken 3 months before an event remain very similar. For example, for half marathons, before the pandemic 62% of all bookings came in the 3 months before the event. In the last 30 days, this has remained at a similar level; 63%

4 weeks out:

As you get closer to race day, booking patterns begin to look a bit different. For 10k runs, 29% of all bookings would have come in the last 4 weeks. Now that's up to 33%.

1 week out:

As you get closer to race day, that trend intensifies. Pre-covid, 1.4% of all half marathon bookings would come in the last week. That's now up to 3.2%, more than double what it was.

This makes properly planning marketing even more important, but it's also a sign that the demand is out there, just waiting until nearer race day before having the confidence to book. Which is understandable and hopefully as confidence returns, booking trends will lengthen out again, closer to the pre-pandemic picture.

We'll keep you informed of what we're seeing on findarace.com but if there are any specific insights you'd be interested to look at, drop me a line at [email protected].